• bus_factor@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

    I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—

        If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.

        Just bad business all around

        • Kinglink@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I don’t know the right price point, but 1 dollar a month probably would have worked for most people. It just wasn’t enough because they probably can make more than 1 by spoon feeding you ads now.

          • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlOP
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            9 months ago

            I’d go as far as 5 dollars a month, which is more than the buck thirty they make off users right now.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              It just boggles the mind.

              They had the userbase. They had the community moderation. They had the power-users basically doing their job for them. They could have had a bulletproof, tied-to-world-population-growth metric - not super fast, but basically monotonically increasing. They basically could have turned it into a sustainable money printer, while not crushing user enthusiasm. Hell, they could have even done an opt- in policy for ML training datasets, either offsetting or outright paying users a commission for content that’s used as part of a training set. There were so many possibilities that didn’t involve pointing the ship at an iceberg.

              Spez threw it away because he wanted the quick payout from ad revenue.

              • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Spez threw it away because he’s a libertarian tool. He doesn’t care how he gets the payout as long as it’s not ‘collectivist’. This commie shit your’e spouting in this post would not impress daddy Elon. GTFO.